@inproceedings{barmandah-etal-2026-fine,
    title = "Fine-Tashkeel at {KSAA}-2026: A Comprehensive Evaluation of {S}eq2{S}eq and Multimodal Approaches for Automatic Diacritization of {A}rabic Speech Dictation",
    author = "Barmandah, Hassan  and
      Eldin, Fatimah Emad  and
      Nacar, Omer  and
      Alzubaidi, Wareef",
    editor = "Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      El-Haj, Mo  and
      Ezzini, Saad",
    booktitle = "The 7th Workshop on Open-Source {A}rabic Corpora and Processing Tools ({OSACT}7) with 5 Shared Tasks",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma, Mallorca (Spain)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/revision-workflow/2026.osact-1.31/",
    doi = "10.63317/4rgtj4c7thyj",
    pages = "234--246",
    abstract = "This paper presents the Fine-Tashkeel system for Task 2 of the KSAA-2026 Shared Task on Automatic Diacritization of Speech Dictation. Diacritization of speech-derived Arabic text poses challenges due to dialectal variation, morphological ambiguity, and the absence of acoustic cues in text-only pipelines. Our approach treats diacritization as a character-level sequence-to-sequence task, mapping undiacritized text directly to its fully diacritized form. We evaluate 18 models spanning text-only, ASR-augmented, and fine-tuned configurations, finding that text-only Seq2Seq approaches outperform off-the-shelf multimodal models{---}a gap we attribute to task mismatch in generic ASR systems rather than an inherent audio limitation. Our best submission, using zero-shot inference without task-specific training, achieved a Diacritic Error Rate (DER) of 10.56{\%}, Word Error Rate (WER) of 34.47{\%}, and Sentence Error Rate (SER) of 79.88{\%}, ranking 5th out of 7 teams. Per-nationality error analysis reveals significant dialectal variation (Egyptian 3.70{\%} vs. Algerian 13.73{\%} DER), and diagnostic analysis confirms that case endings and vowel ambiguity are the primary bottlenecks. Code and evaluation scripts are publicly available."
}